Image credit: Claude Roy, “Le Pécari Ahuri” (Enfantasques : des poèmes et des images imaginés et imagés par l'auteur avec des collages pour les lecteurs de plusieurs âges entre 4 et 104 ans)
Erina Harris is a Canadian poet, scholar, and educator. Her first book The Stag Head Spoke was short-listed for the 2015 Canadian Authors Association award. Her work in experimental feminist poetics continuously explores themes of relationality, power, ethics, and possibility. She recently completed a Post Doctoral Fellowship in Poetics and Pedagogy at the University of Alberta. [More...]
The Stag Head Spoke
**Shortlisted for the CAA Award for Poetry**
“The speaker in Erina Harris’s enchanting and disturbing poems - a speaker part animal, part human, neither living nor dead, inhabited by and inhabiting numerous guises - has suffered an elemental loss, and been given over to ‘trying to return to the memory of [t]his element.’ The poem itself is the site on which Harris’s constitutive breach is re-enacted, and from which the potential for a work of restitution is launched. This is poetry of conceptual brilliance and emotional daring, ‘awed, half-furred, frozen,’ drawn to and from the full repertory of lyric procedure - fable, folk song, interior monologue, meditation, fragment, ritual - and never resting in its quest to find language for the unutterable. The beauty of this work runs as deep as its empathy. The poetic and human issues that trouble Harris are precisely the ones the medium needs to address.”
- Mark Levine, author of Travels of Marco and The Wilds